Researchers from City University London have published a report showing one European newspaper’s steep drop in revenue as well as unsteady Web traffic after it became an online-only publication.

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The report, “Taking the Paper Out of News,” by Neil Thurman, a senior lecturer at the university, and Merja Myllylahti, focuses on Taloussanomat, a financial daily paper in Finland that stopped printing on Dec. 28, 2007 in a cost-cutting move.

According to the report, Taloussanomat, which had a daily circulation of 72,000, lost at least 75% of its revenue as it sacrificed print advertising and subscription fees in the shift. But the more surprising finding concerns its Web traffic.

Initially after becoming an online-only operation, Taloussanomat.fi saw an uptick in traffic, but after five months, unique visits and page views fell by 22% and 11%, respectively, compared with the week before it ended its print edition. Although its traffic recovered by the fall, the report attributes the gains to reader interest in the global financial crisis.

The report also compares the site’s performance to two British news sites, Guardian.co.uk and TimesOnline.co.uk, whose unique visits grew 32% and 60%, respectively, from November 2007 to August 2008. A Finnish competitor, Kauppalehti, climbed 18%. Over the same period, Taloussanomat.fi’s uniques declined 0.26%.

The authors’ goal was to examine a publication that had been online-only long enough to measure its performance. “We don’t have a lot of real-life case studies,” Mr. Thurman says. “This is so new, we don’t have a lot of hard evidence as to what happens.”

The traffic findings were unexpected, Mr. Thurman says. “We thought when the content’s not available in print, maybe they won’t get a huge boost in unique users. But those people who were reading the print edition — they’ll start using the Web site more. But we can’t really see that that happened.”

Reasons for a traffic downturn range from the loss of the print edition’s ability to serve as a marketing tool for the Web site, he says, to the reality of an online-only operation. Since Taloussanomat cut its newsroom, there are fewer original stories available on the site.

“It’s always, I suppose, a bit dangerous to generalize from one case, but obviously there are implications in our findings for what’s been happening at the Seattle P-I, the Christian Science Monitor and probably a number of other newspapers that are going online-only pretty soon,” Mr. Thurman says.

“It doesn’t make for very pleasant reading,” he acknowledges. “The Web is a fundamentally different medium, and you have to completely revise your expectations of how your audience is going to use your content if you’re publishing exclusively online.”